Meanwhile, aboard the ISD What Would Kirk Do?, things are proceeding almost entirely not how I had foreseen it, and popping back into EVE Online after a long weekend of, well, not popping into EVE Online, finds our corporation (Guild) at war again, only this time they mean business.

As with my other EVE posting, I have to be somewhat vague in the precise details, but I can say that this corp has about a dozen members, and shortly after the war declaration showed up in the Corp Window, our boss got an email dictating exactly how much money (in used ones and twos), should placed in exactly how many black plastic bags, and left behind which particular star, in exchange for which, the war might go away again.

I imagine that probably works on a lot of occasions, against small mining and manufacturing corps who are staffed by people who aren't really there for the fighting, and have never really done it, but in our case, although we do mine and make stuff, I think a lot of our people had been getting itchy feet a bit, hence all that internal agonising about 'We should go to 0.0!' I guess I have to wait to see how that resolves itself, because suddenly, with the threat of an external aggressor, all thoughts of the longterm future are forgotten and many of our bored, but very high skill-pointed 0.0 veterans now have something to spice their game up a bit, and a smaller, and far more manageable slice of 0.0 comes to visit us instead.

We've all been missioning and mining for a very long time now, and at the end of the day, the purpose of money in EVE is to buy ships and equipment, and the purpose of ships and equipment, is to be destroyed. It's the circle of life, or something, but the point is, we've got money to burn at the moment, and now, have a reason to burn it. A bit of minor research using the in-game tools revealed that our new friends also had wars going against two other player corporations too, making us the third front. Our people got in touch with the other two target's people, did lunch, and now we've formed up a kind of proto-alliance anyway, based on having a common enemy.

I went along on the first hunting trip, and we managed to pull together a fair sized fleet of medium sized ships. Using cloaked spotters to relay intel to our mobile battlegroup, we managed to track down the enemy in a far off star system, and fell on them at a gate with the wrath of a thousand angry carebears.

The actual texture of real fighting in EVE is quite chaotic. Our enemies are marked out by the CEO's corporate standing settings, and the region around the gates is a wash with red and blue icons, especially since most of the ships involved launched five drones each, adding to the pandemonium. My new PC helps a lot here, and I didn't notice any major lag or stuttering, but I can imagine trying to wade through that with the old PC would be pretty paralysing.

Tactics mostly seem to involve watching chat to see who the gang leader calls as target, then locking on to them and hanging on for dear life. Most of the Empire Wars, such as our is, seem to consist of a lot of gatecamping and station camping, and a bit of hide and seek as targets flee and regroup. All quite exciting of course, but echoing the kind of instinctual anarchy of Planetside, where people just see what they think they ought to be doing, and get on with it, rather than follow a specific chain of command.

Still, our first real outing, and with a bunch of complete strangers from the other two corps, so I'm surprised we did as well as we did, and overall, it was a great success and a heroic space battle, of the Return of the Jedi style that I think I'd been looking for all along, although it was about 90% chasing the enemy about, and only 10% 'Pew Pew!'. We lost a ship or two, but the enemy was quite convincingly decimated, and estimated enemy losses from that one engagement total somewhere around eight times the amount they'd initially tried to extort form us, which is a convincing a way of saying 'No.' as I can think of.

The game has changed a lot now for me. Having a known and calculating Enemy lurking out there alters your perceptions of the universe, and while we won that particular fight, they'll now be looking for different ways to fight back, different tools and strategies, and accordingly, we need to work at improving our own. Yes it was zerging, but it did get the job done, and I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunities in the near future for more elegant one-on-one duelling in the inky depths of the void between worlds. Right now though, it's good to have put on a show of force, and to have demonstrated that us mild-mannered beer-swilling miners and missioneers will not go quietly into that dark night, and very early in the war, the aggressors has been reduced from system conquering star destroyer menace , to plucky guerilla hit-and-run rebels, in little fighter ships.

Whether they'll keep after us now that it's turned from simple extortion job, into full-scale war, and who will 'blink' first, only time will tell...


"Oh... I... oh..."
"What is it Lieutenant Sebastian?"
"It's just the Rebels, sir... they're here."
"My God, man! Do they want tea?"
"No, I think they're after something a bit more than that, sir. I don't know what it is, but they've brought a flag."
"Damn, that's dash cunning of them."
- Eddie Izzard